Is Liferay really as terrible as it seems to be?

July 22, 2010 7:45 AM

Can you explain to me why a company would choose Liferay as their CMS? Because, as a user experience designer, I'm baffled. As far as I can tell, this CMS forces sites to have the worst user experience I've ever seen. Are there benefits on the backend that make it worth causing users this kind of pain? Am I missing something here?

For the past two months I've been designing an intranet for a company who, for various internal-politics-related reasons, is forcing us to use Liferay as the CMS. At every turn this system does nothing but hog-tie me and force me to make terrible UI decisions because that's all that this terrible system is capable of out-of-the-box without major customizations. In addition, the help documentation is just unbelievably poor and full of holes. Obviously it's an open-source system, but the lack of support is intensely frustrating. And the library of available plug-ins is just laughable.

I've never used Liferay before, nor has anyone on my team, so it could just be that we need someone to show us around. Does anyone have positive experiences with Liferay that they'd like to share? Maybe even an example of a well-done site that was built using Liferay?

And if you're a Liferay expert and might be interested in a few hours of consulting as our tech support specialist, let me know that too...

posted by roscopcoletrane to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Hope I'm not being too obvious here, but not every business decision makes sense, particularly to the individual workers/contractors. The higher ups have their own criteria for projects and it's important that you figure that out (it isn't always obvious).
posted by new brand day at 8:07 AM on July 22, 2010

Price generally has a lot to do with things, especially among those who aren't computer savvy and/or won't be the ones using the system.
posted by cestmoi15 at 8:13 AM on July 22, 2010

Change is itself very expensive, since retraining costs often dwarf the cost of the actual software.
posted by smackfu at 8:19 AM on July 22, 2010

the company i work for spent millions of dollars on a system to manage events/sales/contacts that was highly customizable...except you need programmers trained in the system to do stuff with it....and the licenses cost $2K EACH, so running reports is awful because any field employees have to request in advance when they want a report etc since they won't (with good reason) pay $2K each year for every tom, dick, and nancy that wants to be get reports whenever they want.

so instead pretty much every branch has their own way of doing things outside the system the corporate overlords spent so much money on, yet still insist on using because they were told it was so great, against the advice of anyone in tech or the field. so we all use both our own stuff and then spend a lot entering info into both systems. it's not pretty but it's the only way we can get it to work.

and now they won't back down BECAUSE they have spent so much money on it with licenses and training and are now realizing it will never do what they thought it would.

so yeah, business decisions are often made at a much higher level than those who will be directly effected by those decisions, hence it will usually suck for those on the bottom who know better.
posted by inmyhead at 8:56 AM on July 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ha, as someone who was involved in and thus takes responsibility in choosing a really terrible CMS for the Intranet, I can tell you how powerful inertia is.

Now that our Intranet was built with it, and users are trained in it, they don't want to hear, "Wait, now we're going to entirely redo how you publish content so you have to unlearn everything and re-learn something new."

Users who are not Web geeks, UI engineers or programmers might not attach as much value in upgrading a site or a CMS if their interaction is "good enough" - even if the benefits are there. This is particularly true with an Intranet where as long as a user can get the info, fill out the forms, etc., and then get on with the job, he or she will not much care about how bad the UI is.
posted by xetere at 9:02 AM on July 22, 2010

I usually push Wordpress as a CMS for websites I build because its so damn customizable. However, a lot of companies just want something that just works out of the box and is easy for everyone to understand and use. This is especially true if someone there already knows how to use Liferay. Sometimes, that concern trumps the website's UI concerns.
posted by cirrostratus at 9:20 AM on July 22, 2010

> This is especially true if someone there already knows how to use Liferay.

Yeah. Ultimately, this might be less of a "why" question than a "who" question. You might want to find out who is so attached to Liferay, and offer to conduct a mini-seminar on how to use some particular CMS that you prefer.
posted by darth_tedious at 9:34 AM on July 22, 2010

I came across Liferay in another context and was reminded of this question. Its primary pitch seems to be as a portal, and that it's open source. Perhaps it was chosen for those reasons and morphed into the usage as a CMS without a serious evaluation of it as such.
posted by idb at 1:14 PM on July 26, 2010